"By Knowledge & By Love" Michael S Sherwin OP

                                                                                                           By Br. Dominicus


Certain new theologians dispute original sin, which is the only part of Christian
theology which can really be proved. Some followers of the Reverend R.J.
Campbell, in their almost too fastidious spirituality, admit divine sinlessness,
which they cannot see even in their dreams. But they essentially deny human sin,
which they can see in the street. The strongest saints and the strongest sceptics
alike took positive evil as the starting-point of their argument. If it be true (as it
certainly is) that a man can feel exquisite happiness in skinning a cat, then the
religious philosopher can only draw one of two deductions. He must either deny
the existence of God, as all atheists do; or he must deny the present union between
God and man, as all Christians do. The new theologians seem to think it a highly
rationalistic solution to deny the cat.
G.K. Chesterton, Orthodoxy (1)

By Knowledge & By Love         
Michael S Sherwin OP, CUA Press, 2005

(Part 1 of 2)
In 1948 Richard Weaver, then a professor at the University of Chicago,
published a little book titled "Ideas Have Consequences." (2) In it, he argued that
ideas that are dreamed up by lonely, intrepid thinkers in small rooms and ivory
towers somehow seem to find their way into people's consciousness. Some ideas
are good, some are bad. Weaver warned that embracing bad ideas leads to, well,
bad consequences.


The ideas that people embrace are often mediated,
changed, vulgarized versions of these notions conceived by some great and not so great
minds. They spread through the media. In the olden days, papers and magazines, then radio
and tv, and these days through the battlefield of social media. They become part of the
cultural atmosphere we live in. If we want to intellectually confront our time, it is
necessary to understand what these ideas - floating around us in the intellectual air
we breathe- are, where they come from, and how to judge them.

The phenomenon that modern ideas seep in and shape debates happens, of
course, also in Church circles. For example, it seems that an idea born in the fever
of existentialist philosophy of the '60s has influenced much of our thinking since
then. This new understanding - maybe better rethinking - of freedom became a
major theme in the discourse of the ‘60s and ‘70s of the previous century. One of
the most famous names connected with this effort was Karl Rahner. He did not see
freedom as part of our created nature, but rather as a transcendental inner space, a
deep self, that needs to be authentically realized. We have to realize and actualize
that self. (3)  Later, this thought was radicalized especially by German thinkers like
Bernard Häring and especially Josef Fuchs. They historicized the self and argued
that because our human life is one of self-realization through an individual
expression of love, no universalizable norms regulate the right practical reasoning
of man. (4)

In a certain sense, this understanding was developed as a reaction against an
approach based on a legalistic view of the moral life that had developed in the
Church based on the casuistry of popular moral manuals (see my post about Pinckaers ).
Trying to live a moral life seemed to boil down to an effort to
determine "the moral status of an act and its degree of merit and sinfulness" built
on a set of rules. (5) Morality was merely a law that restricted freedom. Our job as
humans was to obey that law. The impulse to think that this is too restrictive a view
of morality seems right to me. This type of interpretation of religious life can lead
to "a preoccupation with sin; an almost obsessive concern for law; and myopic
focus on the individual and his or her specific acts. […] But the [C]hristian life is
more than legal observance." (6) However, the move away from a legalistic approach
to one of freedom, authenticity, and conscience was not without consequence. One
does not need to be a Ph.D. in the sociology of the modern Catholic Church to see
that the focus on the individual conscience and the authentic self, in practice, has
meant that almost anything can be considered "good" by any person. And that, at
the same time, caused the notion of sin and the need for forgiveness to disappear.
There is a reason confessionals are empty. The therapeutic mindset of self-
realization took over the idea of sin and forgiveness. After all, the only thing that
matters is that you claim your fundamental orientation toward love and you work
on self -realization. It is hard to escape the impression that we have embraced the
idea that the fundamental Christian command is to love and do what you will, but
then it is emptied of the Augustinian content.  (end Part 1)

(1) G.K. Chesterton, Orthodoxy, Ignatius Press, 1995, P.19. Also available on
https://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/130/pg130.html
(2) Richard M. Weaver, Ideas Have Consequences, Chicago, 1984

Blog Joy of the Just 2 of Kees Heesters, 
https://www.joyofthejust.com/home/servais-pinckaers-op-the-sources-of-christian-ethics-cua-press1995

(3) Michael S. Sherwin, O.P., By Knowledge & by Love, CUA Press, 2005. P. 8
(4) Matthew levering, The Abuse of Conscience:A Century of Catholic Moral Theology, Eerdmans,
2021. See Review by Jennifer Frey, Get Real, In First Things, Jan. 2023
(5) Sherwin, P. 3
(6) Idem

---